fiefoe

Quoting from this book is easier than shooting fish in a barrel. Oscar Wilde might have appreciated this old Chinese adage: 不做无聊之事,何遣有涯之生。

... of the subject-matter of the artist, but the morality of art consists in the perfect use of an imperfect medium.
An ethical sympathy in an artist is an unpardonable mannerism of style.
It is the spectator, and not life, that art really mirrors.
The only excuse for making a useless thing is that one admires it intensely.
But beauty, real beauty, ends where an intellectual expression begins. Intellect is in itself a mode of exaggeration, and destroys the harmony of any face.
"Conscience and cowardice are really the same things, Basil. Conscience is the trade-name of the firm. That is all."
I choose my friends for their good looks, my acquaintances for their good characters, and my enemies for their good intellects.
Now, the value of an idea has nothing whatsoever to do with the sincerity of the man who expresses it.
He is a suggestion, as I have said, of a new manner. I find him in the curves of certain lines, in the loveliness and subtleties of certain colours.
We live in an age when men treat art as if it were meant to be a form of autobiography. We have lost the abstract sense of beauty.
Beauty is a form of genius-- is higher, indeed, than genius, as it needs no explanation.

"The Picture of Dorian Gray"